Help others discover their spiritual styles

Helping a friend, your family, small group, team, or congregation discover their spiritual styles will release a new level of passion, confidence and reverence in the people around you. The Spiritual Style Test makes this a simple and inexpensive exercise to get underway.

Below you will find step-by-step instructions to guide you through the process that will result in your participants receiving their own Spiritual Style Personal Profile. It will also automatically deliver copies of those profiles back to you (as the sponsor of the process) so that you can produce a Spiritual Style Group Profile, giving you the big picture of the spiritual styles represented in your group. In addition, you will find below some optional suggestions for enhancing the overall experience even further, as well as some ideas of the kind of Spiritual Style discovery groups you could bring together.

If you would like to proceed with this process, you'll want to refer to this instruction page at various times along the way. So, bookmark this page in your web browser, using its bookmark icon or bookmark menu at the top of your screen.

The steps

Visit the intro page for the Spiritual Style Test to see a sample of the Spiritual Style Personal Profile. You may like to share that page with others who should be involved in the decision-making processes.

Obtain sufficient eTest tokens for your group. You will need 1 token for each person who wishes to take the test. Significant volume discounts apply. View volume discounts and obtain tokens.

Collect the names and email addresses of those who will be taking the Spiritual Style Test. If you don't already have those details, you could ask all those involved to send you an email to an email address you specify. That way you will have their email address in the "From" field of the email they send to you.

Make sure that you are logged in to your account on the "3 Color World" website.

Having collected a list of names and email addresses, invite them to take the Spiritual Style Test. The test involves them responding to a series of questions about themselves and usually takes about 15-20 minutes. Whenever someone completes their Spiritual Style Test, you will receive a notification via email and their result will automatically be shared back to your account, since you are the sponsor of the exercise. The invitation email lets people know that this will happen. While the Spiritual Style Test is very quick to complete, due to some people being a little slow to respond to invitations, be sure to invite people to take the test with plenty of lead time, in case you would like to have all of the results ready by a particular date. Once you have sent your invitations, you can monitor their acceptance.

Once all of the participants have completed their test (or as many as you expect will complete it), you can produce a group profile combining all the results, or specific groups of results, with the help of the Advanced Profile option.

Optional steps

Equipping yourself to support others: If you and a few others will be meeting with people to discuss their Spiritual Style Personal Profiles, you will find it very helpful to have a copy of The 3 Colors of Your Spirituality book. It includes descriptions of all of the nine spiritual styles you may encounter during those discussions as well as further implementation ideas and teaching.

Reading the book as a group: Having taken a group through the spiritual style discovery process, you may all be interested in going deeper with the topic. If so, journeying through The 3 Colors of Your Spirituality book with the help of the free downloadable Reading and Discussion Guide might be just the right next step.

Presenting the teaching to others: If you or someone else would like to present a seminar or a sermon series on the topic of spiritual styles, make use of The 3 Colors of Your Spirituality book for ideas about the points you would like to cover. If you would like to make use of visuals to enhance the series, look at the free resources available on the Presentations & Artwork page.

Possible spiritual style groups

You may be the leader of a small group or leadership team that meets together on a regular basis. Imagine if you could create a clearer picture of the way each person in the group best connects with God, so you can validate and encourage them more fully. Furthermore, imagine if week by week you could watch as they embraced aspects of God that they‘ve never seen before, or have even fought against.

Joining with another person for better or for worse is a significant spiritual experience. Sadly, many couples only reach a certain depth and then simply learn to be satisfied, paddling in puddles from God‘s ocean of love. Do you dare to ask the question above of yourself and your dearly beloved? Is it possible that both of you more deeply experiencing God‘s love would mean your affection for each other could become more powerful?

You may have one or more great friends with whom you share your life journey. What if the bond you already have could become even richer as, together, you discover more of God‘s truth, goodness, and beauty?

If you have children or have responsibility for children, at some point they will begin to wonder about the world of spirituality around them. Perhaps God already speaks to them in ways that you are not familiar with. Whether you face parenting alongside a loving spouse or alone, exploring the way in which your child may best connect with God will prove to be a learning experience for them and yourself. Their joy and struggles will begin making more sense and your ability to guide them on life‘s journey will move to a new level. Why not ask your spouse or, if you are parenting alone, another parent, to join you on this spiritual quest for the sake of your family. The Spiritual Style Test can be taken by teenagers and even younger children.

Do you know someone who would like to be, or could become, a great leader? The ability to understand other people‘s spiritual language is a vital part of leadership in any field. You can't lead well without a growing mutual understanding of what matters most to the other person. If you have the opportunity to walk alongside emerging leaders, then using the Spiritual Style Test as a guide in their development will allow you to make a profound difference to the fruit of their influence. Why not work through this process with those you are mentoring or encourage the next level of leaders under your care to take their own apprentices through it.

If you have a friend who would not call themself a Christian but has clear spiritual awareness, understanding each other‘s spiritual starting points could really enhance your friendship. If you yourself believe that there is only one God, perhaps you and your friend are both responding to that same God, but at this stage through different experiences and with a different language. Imagine what could come from finding out that you might be closer to God and to each other than you both realized.

There is much excitement and energy associated with starting a new mission initiative or church. Often this is poured into plans and official statements about “how we will see this community transformed.” But what if God is already working in the lives of those people (and maybe even making great progress with them)? Will you be open to the ways in which God speaks to them? Will you be able to incorporate their experiences of God into your idea of church? Do you even know how your teammates encounter God? It may be worth starting to learn how to “speak” some different “spiritual languages” as you begin working with, and for the sake of, God‘s other children.

Having organized and experienced a group pilgrimage with any of the above people, maybe you‘re motivated to see your whole church go on such an adventure. If so, you‘ll find practical and creative ideas of how to make that happen here. Share your spiritual style discovery experiences with the leadership of your church and offer to help a church-wide spiritual style pilgrimage take place. Beyond this, insight into the distribution of spiritual styles within your local church provides invaluable information to your leadership team.

What are the spiritual strengths of your denomination? Are there areas that have been neglected? Are your programs in line with the actual spiritual styles of your people? It is highly beneficial for every denomination to get an exact picture of how the spiritual styles are distributed. If you collect, for instance, a sample of surveys from 30% of your churches (with at least 30% of their worshipping congregation participating in the test), your Group Profile will provide a very precise picture of your spiritual culture. Even with smaller samples you can start to gain insights into the spiritual make-up of your movement that you are unlikely to detect by any other means. If you would like to explore this larger-scale spiritual style discovery, beyond the instructions found above, you can contact us for additional assistance.

By enabling conference participants to take the Spiritual Style Test via their mobile devices directly at the conference, you can quickly and easily offer a meaningful and memorable learning experience that will add a lot of life to your event. Buy eTest tokens at up to a 60% discount, include that amount in the conference fee, and provide considerable extra-value for each conference participant. Also, adding the Passion Compass exercise to your conference will help dramatize the dynamics of mutual learning, as it demonstrates how easily people with very different spiritual styles can learn from one another. The transferability of that experience will encourage many to replicate the same exercise in their own groups or churches.